With the KDE development and user communities flourishing more than ever, some people are anxious to drum up panic and drama surrounding corporate plays such as the acquisition of SUSE by Novell. As you might know, SUSE has thus far been a huge KDE believer and by using KDE has benefited from a loyal and enthusiastic Linux desktop userbase of its own. Last year, Richard Seibt CEO of SUSE confirmed this sentiment and pledged to maintain SUSE's strong support for KDE. A recent investigation by TechCentral reveals the same: "SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own." said John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region. "We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux."

With the number of incredible KDE Enterprise features available now and planned for the near future, the robustness and vitality of the KDE community, we can remain confident KDE will be an incontrovertible choice for Novell in the long term as well.

Well, sorry to piss on your parade
But it was 13million
And that was to support 90 employees
(at a rather nice 100grand a year salary)
most of whom were working on things other than Nautilus
Eazel went bust because of other things
not because of making nautilus.

> Eazel went bust because of other things not because of making nautilus.

And to think their press releases made it sound like they were finally bringing a GUI to Linux. IIRC they had something like 30 or so developers and 30 or 40 usability people. This was a big time proprietary model writing GPL'd code. Most interesting was their interview answers about how they were going to make money. They had several ideas. Where I come from we call that "What do you mean you don't have a business plan?" Because they were Apple guys who "invented" the GUI after a field trip to Xerox the press treated them like the coming of a messiah.

All I know is that I can't imagine anyone dumping millions in my lap without a business plan. Konqueror seemed to come out with similar features before Nautilus with less developers. I have actually spent money developing Quanta. We use users on CVS for usability testing. I can't begin to imagine what I'd do with $13 million. Given that Quanta has cost a tiny fraction of a percent of that to develop I would guess KDE would have the most formidable application suite in the world within a few years.

I don't use Nautilus so I can't judge their knowledge of software. What Eazel clearly did lack was a business plan or a desire to use common open source methodologies. They did in fact burn money. However a friend of mine who is a financial planner has told me that creatively burning venture capital can leave you set for life, so it's possible I'm missing the real objective. It's difficult for me to imagine the Eazel team being a real hero to anyone who didn't think pro wrestling was real.

The challenge of getting into the desktop market is how to survive while the software grows and matures (years). There is an established competitor who knows full well that it can kill any newcomer by cutting off the cash supply. Can Novell bankroll the whole thing? No way. They are depending on the goodwill and contributions of all the desktop developers. The developers decide where they put their energies.

Maybe Perens has done some inadvertent consulting for Novell with the Userlinux desktop controversy. File under "Mistakes to Avoid".

Because it shows just how expensive it is to develop apps for Gnome. All that money for a file manager and a PIM application? Look at Konqueror, Kroupware and the Kontact suite? How much did that little lot cost in non-existent venture capital funding? Some people on the Gnome side really are living in a fantasy world.

Yeah, I guess what they're trying to say is that there haven't been any big venture capital backed KDE companies. Ximian, Easel and Redhat all rode that wave (for good or bad).

However this basically has nothing to do with their toolkits or whatever. Management quality is not a feature of the toolkit. ;-) So the Easel guys didn't know how to run a for profit company -- this is somehow connected to them using GTK and we're supposed take from this that GTK costs more to develop for?

Not so hard to grok, Scott. The contention is that developing for GTK+ is *hard* compared to Qt, thus (at least on average) it requires more development hours spent for features produced. Someone upthread said that Easel burned through capital primarily through developer salaries and all they had to show was Nautilus.

No, what I showed was that they were paying their developers handsomely.
They had IIRC about 20 out of 30 developers working on Nautilus, the other ten were working on "other things". The rest of the team was managers, PR departments, artists, and other things that weren't overly essential to developing software, but are essential to running a company.

It has *nothing* to do with how hard or easy one toolkit is to use over another.

IMO Eazel's main flaw to to assume that they were going to succeed with no problems at all and expanded too far too quickly. But as Scott said, management competency isn't a feature of either QT or GTK

Whatch your language. Are you trying to discuss something or are you here to call names?

Answering your quastion:

It seems easier to develop to KDE. The development tools are better, the base library is more documented (Qt), the translation tools are excelent (and even used by other desktops), kdevelop rocks, the components (kparts) are easy to implement and easy to use, the XMLUI makes it easy to adapt the existing applications to a specific function.

Howdy Navindra.
Do you do edits on postings? Or is it simple to do so?
It might nice to do some re substitues over the postings and subjects.
Perhaps just replace after the first letter with the usual garbage.

KDE now has a very good foundation of a groupware solution because someone went out and sold a solution, got money for it, stuck their neck out in promising something, then did it. They built on what was there before, and they and others are putting time and resources into finishing the whole thing. We all benefit. Novell can improve and sell it too.

Call it reality. When I see FOSS people doing the industry fluff, vapor and scam stuff, I get disgusted.

Funny, it is just fine and logical to suggest that KDE disappear, but the instance Gnome and their rich fanboys get criticised, the language gets bad real quick.

Indeed, the KDE people (me included) got annoyed with the Userlinux thing. For very good reason, just like you were annoyed and moved to swear when someone had the temerity to suggest that Gnome could be the loser in some decision.

So let's put the shoe on that foot. Does Gnome pay it's way? Does it cover anyone's cash flow requirements? Maybe it does. I know, and I used one example, where it does cover someones cash flow, someone sold a solution based on KDE, were paid for development work that then was put back into the project. This isn't some flakey 'well, if we scam some investors with some grandiose promises...' thing, this is real money for real solutions.

And no, I wasn't referring to you. I don't know who you are.

It isn't KDE people who are saying that there should be one desktop to rule us all. It isn't KDE people who are saying, and I quote "it will take us two years to catch up to KDE in functionality", and suggesting that it would be best if KDE was marginalized, or better, went away. It wasn't the KDE people who were saying that Novell will naturally use their desktop.

KDE people are saying that there are two desktops, will be two desktops, lets make them both work together where it makes sense. And Gnome developers are saying the same things as far as I can tell. There are certain interests and prominent people in the FOSS community that somehow think they can take charge of something that they don't own. So far, it belongs to whoever writes the code. Both KDE and Gnome have active communities, churning out copious amounts of code. And both have growing, enthusiastic user communities. It's not a zero sum game.

This story is very thin on details only suggesting that ultimately Novell will make changes. Anybody have a clue what the thinking is with regard to OpenExchange server? Is it going to get canned in favor of GroupWise? (I hope not!)

The sales of SLOX4.1 are going very well. It has a WebDAV interface which you can easily use from your own applications (see http://devel.slox.info/ ) to access ALL data on SLOX. Together with iSLOX and oSLOX (plugins for Outlook) it allows much over 90% of all Exchange users to switch from Exchange to SLOX without losing functionality while using Outlook as their groupware client. SLOX is really an Exchange killer and Novell would be dumb to throw this away.

since I joined SUSE in January 2003, I learned that KDE is one of the most
successful and fastest evolving open source projects. Since the first day I
use it myself and I am thrilled with it. My personal thanks to all of you who
contributed in the last seven years to KDE.

KDE is the defacto standard for Linux desktops in Europe. Without KDE, I do
not believe we would be seeing the interest in Linux on the corporate desktop
that we are seeing today and on the consumer desktop as well.

Please be clear: SUSE LINUX will continue to strongly support KDE.

Both the Ximian and SUSE LINUX acquisitions reaffirm Novell's strong belief in
the value of the open source development model and strengthen Novell's
commitment to supporting the open source community. SUSE LINUX is an
integrator with a wealth of experience in working with both the open source
community and the IT industry. SUSE LINUX brings extensive experience in KDE
and has a track record working with GNOME. Ximian has core competence in
GNOME and a great desktop focus, both in platform and product offerings.

Together with our Ximian colleagues at Novell, we will also enable our
customers to use GNOME with the same convenience and comfort KDE offers to me
and all SUSE employees today.

The integration capabilities SUSE LINUX brings will continue to help
seamlessly integrate Linux-based offerings, inside and outside of Novell.
Together, we might even think about new opportunities to leverage the usage
of Linux on the desktop. E.g. why do we not open Linux for Apple's Mac OS
desktop?

Today and tomorrow, we must be strongly committed to deliver what our
customers ask us for. They know best what tools will help to fit their needs.
That's why we recently choose our new slogan - Simply change! It is an
affirmation to all of us to listen what our customers and users need
-- and change our manners and goals, if necessary.

Why doesn't it make sense? IBM for example, sells and supports AIX, AS400, the big iron, Windows (alot) and Linux. Why? because the have customers who want one or all of the above.

Right now, Ximian and gnome have valuable elements. KDE has valuable elements. This won't change.

The reason this won't change is because developers that aren't working for Novell will work on, improve, extend, innovate on whatever they feel like. It isn't Novell's to control. Right now if you limit your clients to one desktop, they are missing the strengths of the other. That won't change. KDE will improve to match Gnome where it may lack, and visa-versa. At the same time each advances elsewhere. They will never be equal, or equally suited to all purposes.

The only way the linux desktop can be viable for Novell or SUSE or anyone is to use the work of hundreds of other developers not in your employ. Yes, improve, contribute, finish, maybe gently push in a direction or other. No-one could afford to do it all.

You are talking as if all the decisions on the linux desktop front were already made. Neither gnome nor kde have a clear advantage over each other.

So we may expect that Novell will decide what is best to its business. Companies may try to shape the market, but usually it's the market who shapes the companies! Novell will support either gnome and/or kde if that makes a profit for the company, that's all.

Wow -- I haven't visited the dot in a while, and I'm horried at the attitudes around here. I thought Slashdot was bad ...

Anyways, yes, only 7 bounties were claimed IN TIME for the deadline. The whole contest was only about a month long, and involved a lot of non-GNOME people learning a new development environment.

If you actually look through the bugzilla entries, lurk on the mailing lists, or listen in on irc.gnome.org, you'll see that ALMOST ALL of the bounties are being worked on. Only 7 were finished ahead of time. Others are on the doorstep. Others are still coming in the second round.

While many people are working on the bounties, the people running the contest are holding the highest of standards for the entries. No cheap hacks here.

Other possible reasons:
a) Gaim developers are not forthcoming with accepting patches (who'd have guessed...)
b) Evolution mailer developers both went on 3 weeks vacation over the holidays and so many of the patches could not get committed or discussed
c) Christmas is exam/finals time for students, so hacking is a secondary issue.